LDC 2019 December Newsletter

LDC Membership Discounts for MY2020 Still Available
Spring 2020 Data Scholarship Program – deadline approaching 
Introducing LanguageArc: A Citizen Linguist Portal 

New Publications: 
MagicData Chinese Mandarin Conversational Speech 
BOLT Egyptian Arabic-EnglishWord Alignment -- SMS/Chat Training 
TAC KBP Entity Discovery and Linking - Comprehensive Evaluation Data 2016-2017 
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LDC Membership Discounts for MY2020 Still Available 

Join LDC while membership savings are still available. Now through March 2, 2020, current MY2019 members who renew their LDC membership receive a 10% discount off the membership fee. New or returning member organizations receive a 5% discount through March 2. Membership remains the most economical way to access LDC releases. Visit Join LDC for details on membership options and benefits. 

Spring 2020 Data Scholarship Program – deadline approaching 

Students can apply for the Spring 2020 Data Scholarship Program now through January 15, 2020. The LDC Data Scholarship program provides students with no-cost access to LDC data. For more information on application requirements and program rules, please visit LDC Data Scholarships.

Introducing LanguageArc: A Citizen Linguist Portal 

LanguageARC is a citizen science website for languages developed with a grant from the National Science Foundation (no. 170377). Contributors to this online community – “citizen linguists” – participate in a variety of tasks and activities that support linguistic research, such as identifying accents from audio clips, recording “tongue twisters,” and translating English sentences into other languages. Data collected from LanguageArc will be made freely available to the research community. New collection and annotation projects will be added on an ongoing basis, and researchers will soon be able to create their own LanugageArc projects with an easy-to-use Project Builder Toolkit.  All are encouraged to explore the site and participate in the community. Comments, questions and suggestions are welcome via the site’s Contact page. 
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New publications:

(1) Magic Data Chinese Mandarin Conversational Speech was developed by Beijing Magic Data Technology Co., Ltd. and consists of approximately 10 hours of Mandarin conversational speech from 60 speakers. Each conversation was recorded on multiple devices and is presented in multiple forms, resulting in a total of approximately 60 hours of audio with corresponding transcripts.

All participants were native speakers of Mandarin in Mainland China from accent regions across the country. Speakers were paired for conversations on a range of topics, including travel, fitness, games, sports and pets. Metadata such as topic, collection date, mobile device and speaker demographic information is available in the documentation accompanying this release. 

Magic Data Chinese Mandarin Conversational Speech is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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(2) BOLT Egyptian Arabic-English Word Alignment -- SMS/Chat Training was developed by LDC and consists of 349,414 words of Egyptian Arabic and English parallel text enhanced with linguistic tags to indicate word relations.

This release contains Egyptian Arabic source text message and chat conversations collected using two methods: new collection via LDC's collection platform, and donation of SMS or chat archives from BOLT collection participants. The source data is released as BOLT Egyptian Arabic SMS/Chat and Transliteration (LDC2017T07).

The BOLT word alignment task was built on treebank annotation. Egyptian Arabic source tree tokens were automatically extracted from tree files in LDC’s BOLT Egyptian Arabic Treebank, which had been tagged for part-of-speech and syntactically annotated. That data was then aligned and annotated for the word alignment task. 

BOLT Egyptian Arabic-English Word Alignment -- SMS/Chat Training is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee. 

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(3) TAC KBP Entity Discovery and Linking - Comprehensive Evaluation Data 2016-2017 was developed by LDC and contains training and evaluation data produced in support of the TAC KBP Entity Discovery and Linking (EDL) tasks in 2016 and 2017. This corpus includes queries, knowledge base (KB) links, equivalence class clusters for NIL entities, and entity type information for each of the queries. The EDL reference KB, to which EDL data are linked, is available separately in TAC KBP Entity Discovery and Linking - Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2014-2015 (LDC2019T02). 

The goal of the EDL track is to conduct end-to-end entity extraction, linking and clustering. For producing gold standard data, given a document collection, annotators (1) extract (identify and classify) entity mentions (queries), link them to nodes in a reference KB and (2) perform cross-document co-reference on within-document entity clusters that cannot be linked to the KB.

Source data for the annotations consists of Chinese, English and Spanish newswire and discussion forum text collected by LDC and is available in TAC KBP Evaluation Source Corpora 2016-2017 (LDC2019T12).

TAC KBP Entity Discovery and Linking - Comprehensive Evaluation Data 2016-2017 is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

LDC 2019 November Newsletter

Join LDC for Membership Year 2020
Spring 2020 Data Scholarship Program

New Publications: 
DEFT English Committed Belief Annotation
CALLFRIEND American English-Non-Southern Dialect Second Edition
TAC KBP Cold Start -Comprehensive Evaluation Data 2012-2017
IARPA Babel Amharic Language PackIARPA-babel307b-v1.0b

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Join LDC for Membership Year 2020 

Membership Year 2020 (MY2020) is open and discounts are available for those who keep their membership current and join early in the year. Now through March 2, 2020, current MY2019 members who renew their LDC membership before March 2 will receive a 10% discount off the membership fee. New or returning organizations will receive a 5% discount through March 2.

In addition to receiving new publications, current LDC members also enjoy the benefit of licensing older data at reduced costs from our Catalog of over 800 holdings. Current-year for-profit members may use most data for commercial applications.

Plans for MY2020 publications are in progress. Among the expected releases are: 

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) Annotation Release 3.0: semantic treebank of over 59,000 English natural language sentences from broadcast conversations, newswire, weblogs and web discussion forums; updates the second version (LDC2017T10) with new annotations 
TAC KBP: English sentiment slot filling, surprise slot filling, nugget detection and coreference, and event argument data in all languages (English, Chinese and Spanish) 
DEFT Chinese ERE: Chinese discussion forum data annotated for entities, relations and events 
LibriVox Spanish: 73 hours of Spanish audiobook read speech and transcripts
IARPA Babel Language Packs (telephone speech and transcripts): languages include Dhuluo, Javanese and Mongolian 
HAVIC Med Training data: web video, metadata, and annotations for developing multimedia systems 
RATS Speaker Identification: conversational telephone speech in Levantine Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, Farsi and Dari on degraded audio signals with annotation of speech segments for speaker identification 
BOLT: discussion forums, SMS/chat, conversational telephone speech, word-aligned, tagged and co-reference data in all languages (Chinese, Egyptian Arabic, and English) 

It’s also not too late to join for MY2018 (through December 31, 2019) and MY2019 (through December 31, 2020). Data sets from those years include Concretely Annotated New York Times and English Gigaword, DIRHA English WSJ Audio, BOLT English Treebank – Discussion Forum, First DIHARD Challenge Development and Evaluation releases, Penn Discourse Treebank Version 3.0, and 2016 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set. 

For full descriptions of all LDC data sets, browse our Catalog.

Visit Join LDC for details on membership, user accounts and payment. 

Spring 2020 Data Scholarship Program 

Applications are now being accepted through January 15, 2020 for the Spring 2020 LDC Data Scholarship program which provides university students with no-cost access to LDC data. Consult the LDC Data Scholarship page for more information about program rules and submission requirements.

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New publications: 

(1) DEFT English Committed Belief Annotation was developed by LDC and consists of approximately 950,000 words of English discussion forum text annotated for "committed belief," which marks the level of commitment displayed by the author to the truth of the propositions expressed in the text.

DARPA's Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT) program aimed to address remaining capability gaps in state-of-the-art natural language processing technologies related to inference, causal relationships and anomaly detection. LDC supported the DEFT program by collecting, creating and annotating a variety of data sources.

DEFT English Committed Belief Annotation is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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(2) CALLFRIEND American English-Non-Southern Dialect Second Edition was developed by LDC and consists of approximately 26 hours of unscripted telephone conversations between native speakers of non-Southern dialects of American English. This second edition updates the audio files to wav format, simplifies the directory structure and adds documentation and metadata. The first edition is available as CALLFRIEND American English-Non-Southern Dialect (LDC96S46).

All data was collected before July 1997. Participants could speak with a person of their choice on any topic; most called family members and friends. All calls originated in North America. The recorded conversations last up to 30 minutes. 

CALLFRIEND American English-Non-Southern Dialect Second Edition is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee. 

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(3) TAC KBP Cold Start - Comprehensive Evaluation Data 2012-2017 was developed by LDC and contains Chinese, English and Spanish data produced in support of the TAC KBP Cold Start evaluation track conducted from 2012 to 2017. This corpus includes source documents, queries, assessments, manual runs and final assessments. 

In the Cold Start track, systems were evaluated on their ability to construct a new knowledge base (KB) from information provided in a text collection in combination with technologies developed in other TAC KBP tracks -- slot filling, information extraction, question answering and entity discovery and linking. Cold Start systems were required to find all entities in the text, and the KB must have ideally included every person, organization, and geo-political entity as well as all the targeted relations between them. To facilitate the evaluation of those KBs, LDC annotators created sets of queries, human-generated responses to the queries, and assessments of both human and system responses. 

The source data in this release is comprised of English and Spanish newswire and web text collected by LDC for the 2012, 2014 and 2015 evaluations and the 2016 pilot collection. The source collections for the 2016 and 2017 evaluations, which include Chinese data, are available in TAC KBP Evaluation Source Corpora 2016-2017 (LDC2019T12). The archived 2013 Cold Start source data collection is available from NIST upon request.

TAC KBP Cold Start - Comprehensive Evaluation Data 2012-2017 is distributed via web download. 

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee. 

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(4) IARPA Babel Amharic Language Pack IARPA-babel307b-v1.0b was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. It contains approximately 204 hours of Amharic conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2014 along with corresponding transcripts.

The Amharic speech in this release represents the Addis Ababa, Shewa, and Gondar dialect regions of Ethiopia. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 60 years. Calls were made using different telephones (e.g., mobile, landline) from a variety of environments including the street, a home or office, a public place, and inside a vehicle.

IARPA Babel Amharic Language Pack IARPA-babel307b-v1.0b is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

LDC 2019 October Newsletter

Membership Year 2020 Publication Preview

LDC data and commercial technology development 

New Publications: 
BOLT English Treebank - Discussion Forum 
Polish Speech Database 
2016 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set 
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Membership Year 2020 Publication Preview 

The 2020 Membership Year is just around the corner and plans for next year’s publications are in progress. Among the expected releases are:

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) Annotation Release 3.0: semantic treebank of over 59,000 English natural language sentences from broadcast conversations, newswire, weblogs and web discussion forums; updates the second version (LDC2017T10) with new annotations

TAC KBP: English sentiment slot filling, surprise slot filling, nugget detection and coreference, and event argument data in all languages (English, Chinese and Spanish)

DEFT Chinese ERE: Chinese discussion forum data annotated for entities, relations and events

LibriVox Spanish: 73 hours of Spanish audiobook read speech and transcripts

IARPA Babel Language Packs (telephone speech and transcripts): languages include Dhuluo, Javanese and Mongolian

HAVIC Med Training data: web video, metadata, and annotations for developing multimedia systems

RATS Speaker Identification: conversational telephone speech in Levantine Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, Farsi and Dari on degraded audio signals with annotation of speech segments for speaker identification

BOLT: discussion forums, SMS/chat, conversational telephone speech, word-aligned, tagged and co-reference data in all languages (Chinese, Egyptian Arabic, and English)

Check your inbox in the coming weeks for more information about membership renewal. 

LDC data and commercial technology development 

For-profit organizations are reminded that an LDC membership is a pre-requisite for obtaining a commercial license to almost all LDC databases. Non-member organizations, including non-member for-profit organizations, cannot use LDC data to develop or test products for commercialization, nor can they use LDC data in any commercial product or for any commercial purpose. LDC data users should consult corpus-specific license agreements for limitations on the use of certain corpora. Visit the Licensing page for further information.

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New publications:  

(1) BOLT English Treebank - Discussion Forum was developed by LDC and consists of 268,907 tokens of English web discussion forum data with part-of-speech and syntactic structure annotations collected for the DARPA BOLT (Broad Operational Language Translation) program.

Part-of-speech and treebank annotation conformed to Penn Treebank II style, incorporating changes to those guidelines that were developed under the GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program. Supplementary guidelines for English treebanks and web text are included with this release.

The source data is English discussion forum web text collected by LDC in 2011 and 2012. A subset of that data -- 702 files representing 268,907 tokens -- was selected for the treebank and annotated for word-level tokenization, part-of-speech and syntactic structure. The unannotated English source data is released as BOLT English Discussion Forums (LDC2017T11).

BOLT English Treebank - Discussion Forum is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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(2) Polish Speech Database was developed by VoiceLab and consists of 263,424 utterances of Polish speech data from 200 speakers, totaling approximately 280 hours, and corresponding transcripts.

Data collection was performed in Poland. Speakers were asked to record themselves reading text on a website for at least 60 minutes from their home computer while using a headset. The read text was comprised of sentences covering most speech sounds in Polish.

This release includes speaker metadata. There were 103 male speakers and 97 female speakers, ranging from 15 – 60 years of age; most speakers were in the 15 – 30 years age range.

Polish Speech Database is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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(3) 2016 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set was developed by LDC and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and contains approximately 340 hours of short segments of Tagalog, Cantonese, Cebuano and Mandarin telephone speech used as development and test data in the NIST-sponsored 2016 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE). 

As in previous evaluations, SRE16 focused on telephone speech recorded over a variety of handset types for the training and test conditions. In addition to development and evaluation data, this corpus also contains trial lists, their associated keys, tables containing metadata information, and evaluation documentation.

The telephone speech data was drawn from the Call My Net 2015 Corpus collected by LDC. Native speakers of Tagalog, Cantonese, Cebuano or Mandarin (220 unique speakers) made a total of ten telephone calls each to people within their existing social networks. Speakers were encouraged to use different telephone instruments in a variety of acoustic settings and were instructed to talk for 8 - 10 minutes per call on a topic of their choice. All conversations were collected outside North America.

 

2016 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set is distributed via web download.  

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.